By Lamplight
by Bainaku
Summary: A collection of missing scenes — of moments mentioned, of things implied — written as the series progresses. Next up is "Foreshadow," wherein Korra does not tread lightly.
1. Ties

**A/N: **Sometimes friendships transcend lifetimes. Or generations.

* * *

**TIES**

* * *

He is a man of much strength and many scruples.

When he receives the call, he cups the receiver in a hand unwavering: later fastens his cloak with fingers that neither tremble nor quiver. Pema's silhouette in the stairwell gives him pause, though. He glances aside to her, drawing his hood up over his head's smooth curve, as she asks, "Tenzin? Was that—"

"Yes," he agrees. He tightens the hood. The wind outside will be cold: where he's going colder still.

His wife's face is unreadable for the darkness, but the air speaks enough of her sorrow: the hiss of it over her teeth and against her tongue; the clink of it falling like a coin down her throat, hot, wet. "Oh," she says, and it's a whisper. "Is he—" She stops herself: starts again, "Are we going now?"

The bottom stair creaks as it always has, and she reaches for him in the dark. He catches her at the elbow—draws her in against him and feels the feather of her breath in her chest. He already knew, but she's crying. He wants to cry too—to drop his face into her hair and sob, even. But he is a man of much strength and many scruples. His eyes are dry, his grasp certain. He reaches for the second cloak on its peg and drapes it over Pema's shoulder.

He says, "Hurry."

—-

Bumi is peeling thick chunks of ice off the shelf at the dock and hurling them out into the sea beyond the breakers. He is bare-chested: the cords of muscle between his shoulders bunch and clench and his face, chapped, is bright with moisture in the polar sunlight. Tenzin lands Oogi next to his brother. For a while he watches the display of grief and frustration, silent, Pema's breath making clouds in the air at his ear.

When the shorter sibling finally turns toward them, he doesn't so much see them as he stares through them. His hands are raw, seared by salt. Tears drip from the tawny hook of his cheek, those that haven't yet frozen.

"Tenzin?" he croaks. One step, two and his knees go to water.

Tenzin races across the invisible bridge between them, seizing Bumi before he can touch the slush. He closes his eyes as the older man's fists drum on his back, his bicep—as Bumi thrashes and howls.

Strength. Scruples.

He holds his brother—and then his sister, and finally his mother—as long as he must.

—-

His father's hand is smooth and cold and still.

He clutches it.

_Strength_, he reminds himself.

—-

Representatives from everywhere crowd his childhood home. They toast Avatar Aang's legacy of balance, peace, prosperity. Over and over. _Ting _sing the tines of forks on glasses, the alarum of an era's end. Wine and other spirits pass under Tenzin's nose all the while, agents that would numb the ache in him if he would only reach out and take—

_Scruples_, he remembers. Though his nails dig grooves in his palms, from his sleeves his hands never venture.

—-

His stay at the Pole is cruelly brief. The skin of ice over the tundra's newest grave is but thin and fresh when he takes to the sky again, bound for Republic City and the ripples of rebellion rising there.

"You should rest," Pema insists upon their touchdown in the temple's shadow. She slides down from Oogi's saddle and turns to blink back up at him, expectant, stretching her arms high as though to receive him too.

He only smiles and shakes his head, snapping the reins. "I'll see you later," he promises. It is with a great weariness that he considers the words he and his father once cried into the winds together, breathless and laughing, and he remembers—all at once, in a flood—the creak of leather and the dry-sweet smell of the robes that so often closed over him, the beard that wagged and scratched at his shaven scalp and how their elbows notched, two blue sets of arrows winding parallel toward the horizon and—

Strength. Strength. _Strength_.

"Yip yip," he manages.

—-

The leaders and protectors of Republic City convene over tea at a long mahogany table. Other council members palm his knuckles and provide their condolences: the mayor nearly clings to him, and the anguish in the room is not just that of indecision over the riots in the streets. His father was, after all, much beloved.

Tenzin is no Waterbender, but he does know the absence of air and his chest is tight, so tight, and even for all the hands offered to him he feels as though he is drowning.

The last to come to him does not touch him. She nevertheless pulls him from the maelstrom.

"Councilman Tenzin," she says coolly. Her pale eyes sweep him, top to toes: settle on his face once more. "Accompany me to my office." There is no _please_. "Recent events leave us with much to discuss."

Protests ring from the others assembled. "We have things to discuss with him too, Chief Beifong," the mayor supplies. "He's come all this way—"

"The safety of your citizens is your highest priority, is it not?" In the ensuing silence, the metalbender rolls her shoulder and looks at him. "Councilman." She departs the room.

There is no fight in him. Tenzin follows.

The walls part for their passage, and in not but a moment they are enclosed in a space reminiscent of a cell: windowless, doorless. Taking a seat behind the chamber's spartan desk, Chief Bei Fong flicks her hand, summoning up from the floor a second chair. Tenzin settles in it. He bows his head beneath the circle of harsh light from ceiling's fixture, studying his knees, awaiting her spark to start the wick of their conversation.

A drawer squeals instead. He blinks aloft and finds the policewoman pulling from her desk a small cup and a bottle of clear liquid smaller still. With the latter she fills the former partway: slides it across the desk to him. He stops it toppling to the floor, at least, fumbling it between his thumb and forefinger.

It smells of nothing. Not water. Not tea.

"A sedative," she provides, and finishes, "of sorts." And then: "Drink."

He starts, "I am a man of _scrupl_—"

"Cut the garbage, Tenzin," she interrupts, and in her voice there is a whisper of another reprimand gifted to the pair of them by loved ones both gone now: _can it, Twinkletoes._

He looks down at the cup.

He is a man of much strength and many scruples.

Except when he isn't.

It is one mouthful, tasteless, cold. He has no more swallowed it when the cup slips from his grasp and goes clattering away. Distantly he feels himself slumping forward—feels his arm hit the desk, followed by his cheek and his shoulder last.

He feels the wet on his face, finally, and the firm pressure of her hand as she folds it over his.


	2. Three Lessons

**A/N: **For Yamino.

* * *

**THREE LESSONS  
**

* * *

"Ow!" She flinches, scrunching her face up as she turns to shoot a glare largely false over her shoulder. "What're you picking at me with, kid? A crablobster claw?"

Her smile all teeth and eagerness, Ikki beams unabashedly up at the Avatar. "They're _tweezers_," she professes. Rocking forward on her knees and arching too, she rasps the metal tongs over the tip of Korra's nose. "You've got about a _billion _splinters."

"A billion cuts," Jinora adds, leaning in toward the Waterbender's front with a cotton swab.

"Billion _bruises_," croons Meelo. He gives one of the largest mentioned blotches a prod. "Purple and _green _and orange and—"

"Yeah, yeah, a whole rainbow, I got it, fine," Korra sighs. She knocks her knuckles against the turnip-shaped head of her youngest nurse. "Hey, Meelo—c'mon." The medicine burns. Holding still against the tingle even so, she urges, "Show me those moves again, okay?"

The wind is soft in the grove. Clambering obediently upright, the little boy half-dances over to where the panes of wood in their grooves spin gently, and when Meelo's heels come down hard the breeze does too, almost roaring. "Hah!" he says. He wheels to look at her, eyes wide, gray like bubbles of air beneath the ice, like Naga's fur after she's been through the smokehouse in search of herring. "You gotta"—his hands rise, curved; his arms wiggle—"be the _leaf_, Korra!"

He turns, taking the wind with him through the panes and the pegs. He is a flash of yellow, then orange: out on the other side quicker than she can blink, unscathed. His gaze flicks to her again as envy coils in her chest, more painful than the antiseptic slipping down her arm and pooling in her wounds.

"The leaf," he repeats. It comes out laughing, but there's a little of his father in his face whether he means it or not: in the crease at his temple, pinching. In the way his breath curls out slow. The panes swirl behind him, beckoning.

The tribeswoman rises. Jinora clucks. Tweezers catching the sunset's glow, Ikki says, "Aw! Not again!" but she's giggling, hoping, and Korra smiles despite herself.

"Yeah, one more time." She joins Meelo. Knowing her question already, he poses for her, his stubby fingers turned down and his thumbs sticking out like the handles of fancier teacups. "Like this?" she asks, mimicking him.

"Relax your shoulders," Jinora insists.

"Oh boy," says Ikki.

Less than half a minute later, Meelo informs her, "Billion and _one _bruises," and crawls atop her back to perch in the well between her heaving shoulders. He pulls the sweaty tail of her hair aside: leans over her, his slight weight driving her chin and cheek down into the dirt. The panes creak beside them, slowing now, almost sluggish. In her ribs she can feel the pressure of the points of his shoes.

"Next time," he promises her, and plants a wet kiss in the sweat along the nape of her neck. He finishes, "Ew."

**—-**

The mattress bounces and the child's hip rolls against hers. Smirking down, Korra asks, "What?" She wiggles her eyebrows because Ikki likes it, then snaps her nightshirt and wriggles into it, making to pull the garment down over her head. It catches on her ear.

"Lemme play with your hair," Ikki demands. Pooching out her lips, she helps Korra yank the shirt into place and adds, "Please?" Longingly she stretches her fingers up to the dark tendril left of the Avatar's cheek. Her palm flashes in the room's weak light, smooth, small.

"Okay," Korra says easily.

"Really?"

The older girl grins and shrugs. She turns on the bed to better face the young Airbender, lowering her head. Ikki is barefoot. Her toes wiggle: twitch, fervent. "Careful," Korra warns. Producing a comb from a sleeve, her visitor pauses to listen. She continues, "There are probably tangles." Her company's nightgown has flowers on it, she notes. Yellow ones.

"I'll be gentle," vows Ikki. She is, mostly. Cupping Korra's chin in a grasp more feathery than firm, she runs the comb's teeth through the tribeswoman's fringe first. The thick locks snag, still wet from the shower, but Ikki works at them, elbow shivering, tongue caught in the cage of her teeth. "Jinora doesn't like to let me do this anymore," she says, "and Mama's tired all the time and Meelo doesn't have hair and Daddy, _puh_"—her cheek scrunches; her nose wrinkles and her eyes narrow, guileless—"he says having braids in his beard isn't _dignified_."

"What a lame-o," Korra commiserates, and wonders then, "you're gonna braid mine? My hair?"

As it turns out, maybe not. Ikki pulls free the ties in it and observes the swaying, sweeping curtain it makes along the older girl's shoulders, damp, the ends wanting to curl. She stops then, nibbling her lower lip. She admits, "My braids are always crooked. Jinora—she's better at them. And Mama's best."

But her fingers twist together, wistful. The comb taps in her knee's crease. She looks at Korra through the slats of her lashes and the tribeswoman feels herself give way, all slush inside.

"Just between you and me, well, I _like _crooked braids," she offers, and ignores the laughter at breakfast the next morning.

**—-**

It wakes her like the shake of a hand would, suddenly and with enough force that her head snaps up from her pillow. She waits tensely, curling her fingers in her sheets. It comes again but a moment later. Through the sleeping temple it is a sharp bramble of noise: _rmmmm_. The floor trembles. Korra's bed does too as she vaults out of it, following the sound at a run from her room and down the hall.

An avalanche, she thinks. But there's no snow here, no ice to crack: nothing outside but the bay and a sky full of weird clouds, their undersides coffee-colored and swirled for the glint of the city's lights. She stands confused in the dojo's archway, staring out through the windows toward the Pro-Bending arena and the docks even beyond that. She is still watching when a thin tongue of light snips down across the horizon, glacial blue and gone faster than she can fathom. She goggles. Awed gooseflesh pricks up the hair on her arms.

"You've never seen a storm before, huh?" whispers a voice in the dark. Korra blinks and checks it. From the shadows of the hall Jinora comes tiptoeing, her knees knifing up almost to her chest, her nightgown aflutter. The floorboards don't squeak even once under her. As she draws abreast of Korra, she pursues keenly, "You don't have them up at the Pole, do you?"

"Not like this." Brushing sleep from her eye's corner, the Avatar looks back out across the bay. There is another whicker of jagged light beneath the clouds: underfoot the dojo's mats quiver, and Korra rocks back to feel the tempo of the sky in her heels. "They were all snow and ice and wind up there. But thunder and lightning—yeah, wow." She stops, her pulse heady in her ears and hard behind her collar. "This is my first time seeing them outside my head," she says. "Because I've read about them. Maybe dreamed about them too."

A faint rustle: Jinora's feet on the mats, finally. She asks, "Are you scared?"

Korra isn't. She folds her legs and settles on the mats, rubbing her palms over her knees and picking at the wrinkles in the cloth there idly. "You like stories, right?" She looks up at Jinora. The girl's round face flares white-hot briefly in the storm's shivery glow, the snub of her nose like an upturned petal, her mouth a bowl of shadows. "Stories about the past? Your grandfather?"

"Oh," says Jinora. At once she drops, the thump of her thighs and ankles on the mat muffled for the thunder. "Oh"—she takes Korra's hand without asking and tugs it, hope in the press of her thumb, curiosity in the shade that scribbles down her cheek—"yes, very much." She tacks on, "I wish I'd known him."

Outside the wind is rising, bringing in its bower the lowing of the bison and the lemurs chittering behind them. Korra squeezes Jinora's hand and says, "You do."

She straightens. There is a twinge near her spine's center, a phantom ache: when she glances to the glare of the storm on the water, it throbs. Her heart crowds up into her throat. Swallowing it, she begins, "A long time ago, once, there was a princess who could bend lightning."


	3. Burning Question

**BURNING QUESTION**

* * *

She finds him sitting on the rooftop's edge, looking out over the city and its lights like some narrow brooding vulturehawk, his shoulders a slanted square of black against the glare. Thumping one, she drops next to him and sweeps her legs out across the ledge. She swings them once, twice: looks at him sideways, smiling. Of course, he doesn't smile back—not quite. Not _yet_.

Their knees knock.

"So," she tries.

His mouth's corner twitches. His nostrils flare and he volleys back, "So?"

"So we're on the same team now and stuff," Korra offers. "We'll be seeing a lot of each other. I guess we should, I dunno"—she shrugs—"try to have a civil conversation now? Get to know each other, maybe?"

Mako exhales, a sound too short for a sigh, too long for a chuckle. Digging his chin down into his scarf, he turns his gaze to her and blinks. "Fine." Over that scarf his breath steams. "What do you want to know?"

"Dude. What does _everyone _want to know?" Korra spreads her hands. "What's with the eyebrows?"


	4. Belief

**A/N: **Chief Beifong is not impressed.

* * *

**BELIEF**

* * *

"Councilman Tenzin's here to see you, Chief."

The desk officer's bulky silhouette fills the doorway. Glancing briefly up from her report, Chief Beifong nods—rolls one shoulder in curt acknowledgement. A moment later the door closes again. The corner of her report flutters and she sighs, snapping then, "Leash your breezes, Tenzin." But the ink on the parchment is dry now, at least, and she puts it aside.

"Lin." The tall man approaches her desk: folds one hand about its edge. He brings with him the scent of storms, fresh and hurried, seething. "I'm glad I caught you."

"And you'd better be." The policewoman reaches to tap her thumb to the nearest wall. A chute like a mouth opens there, and she picks up the stack of reports in her other hand to ladle them into it. "I've just finished." She looks up a second time, noting the crease of Tenzin's mouth, the tension in the fall of his arm. His knuckles are white, his robes askew. A thread of worry coils in her belly. "What is it? Is Pema—"

"Fine." The cluster of lines on Tenzin's chin and cheek untangle briefly. He flashes the policewoman a grateful smile, hurrying to add before she can ask after them, "And the children too. They're all sleeping."

Letting out a small huff of a breath through her nose, Lin smoothes the chute on the wall into nothing—leans back in her chair. "Why the late visit, then? You obviously came in a hurry." She points to his ceremonial sash, rumpled and backwards.

"It's Korra."

"Ah." Lin shrugs, flicking her fingers to the senior airbender dismissively. She rises next, removes her jacket from its hook. The worry in her belly is overrun now by a truer gnawing: lunch was more than ten hours ago and there is, she reflects, a worthwhile dumpling stand on her walk home. "The Avatar has determined _not _to grace my cells with her presence today. Sorry"—except she isn't, no, not at all; perhaps she'll get a sachet of sweetmeats too, she muses—"if you're looking for her, she's not here."

She makes to shrug into the jacket. Ever the gentleman, Tenzin reaches to help her with the second sleeve. He says, though, as she pulls the collar around and drops her hands to work at the first button, "She attended an Equalist rally this evening."

"The supposed Revelation?" Lin has seen the flyers: has copies of them in the drawer just right of her wrist, all four versions.

"The very same. She says…" But he stops, hesitates: allows, "She insists she saw Amon remove a person's bending."

Sharp in the room rolls the scent of thunder, the ozone shiver of lightning at its head. Slowing her fingers, Lin considers—watches her lifelong friend from the corner of her eye. "And you find her word credible?"

Tenzin inclines his head. "She was genuinely afraid."

"Is that so? I hope you put her snugly to bed before you left."

"Lin!" Faint patches of pink gather in the grooves of the man's cheeks. "This is no laughing matter!"

"Do you see me laughing?" _Snik-tch_: Lin finishes with the jacket's last button and turns her gaze to Tenzin's face. "Answer my question this time. Do you find her word credible or not?"

Following a brief pause, Tenzin agrees, "If you're asking whether I trust her testimony, my _answer_"—he punctuates this with a pointed frown—"is yes. I believe she saw Amon do _something_. But—"

The police chief holds up a hand, effectively cutting off the councilman's next statement. She says, "I'm hungry. What? Don't look at me like that, Tenzin, spirits save you. Your face might stick that way." Turning from the airbender's scowl, she makes shamelessly for the door and provides, "Walk with me. Tell me what the girl said."

—-

The night is cold. The dumplings aren't. Bouncing the packet from the tips of her fingers to her palm to cool them, Lin purses her lips. "And Zolt couldn't bend after Amon performed his… miracle?"

"Supposedly not." Covetously the airbender eyes the policewoman's purchase.

"Hm." She tucks the packet to her breast, where it rests like a low coal against her jacket's uppermost clasp. Her thumb slips in the grease on the waxed paper and she says, "It sounds like a sham."

"Pardon?"

"A sham," echoes Lin. She starts for home once more, the clack of her boots staccatoed and soft on the sidewalk. Overhead the stars glitter though a skein of steam and slow smoke. "A _show_. A setup. Clever, yes, and clearly successful if Korra believes what she saw—but altogether false. Amon only _said _Zolt's firebending was gone. There was no lasting proof of its removal."

With such long legs, Tenzin has no trouble keeping up with her. His footfalls are nigh nonexistent, his presence at her side a whisper of the wind come and gone. "You mean you think, what, that Amon and the gangs staged the whole thing? That they're in on it together? That Zolt only _acted _like his firebending had been taken away?"

Lin shifts the packet of dumplings to her other hand: blows on her palm, her breath a cloud against the night's dusky press. "Seems likely," she says. "Think about it. Amon knew that young earthbender—what's his name, Bolin—was Korra's friend." As Tenzin nods, the police chief persists, "The radio, television, newspapers: they all cover Pro-bending. Come on. Even _I _know the kid's team's called the Fire Ferrets."

She unwraps the packet, removes the first dumpling, and bites into it. She only resumes after she's savored and swallowed the first bite. "So Amon had Bolin kidnapped knowing Korra would come looking for him. Knowing she'd find the rally—knowing she'd see his demonstration, take it to heart, and spread the word about it." Motioning with the bitten bread, she finishes, "He's a smart guy. You're here, aren't you?"

Tenzin tugs the twist of his beard. "Ah. So I am." The smallest vestige of a smile creeps up his cheek.

Three more bites and the dumpling's toast. Delicately licking her fingers clean—waste not—Lin smirks sidelong at her friend. "It's a fear-mongering campaign, Baldy, that's all. And one doomed to fail. Amon might have the gangs in his pocket now, but they're sharp as a blade together and they'll cut him sooner than later."

"Why would any of the triads think to work with him anyway, Lin? He's a non-Bender. Not that that's a bad thing," he tacks on, and Lin thinks he's probably thinking of his wife for the way his eyes, full of fondness, cut across the bay toward the acolytes' temple. "But what could he offer them?"

"Probably he's promised to overthrow the government and give them a cut of the city once it's in his power," deadpans the police chief. "And they plan to kill him and take it all, of course."

For a while they step down the still lane in silence. Lin polishes off two more dumplings and is working on the fourth when Tenzin speaks again. "And if his talent _does _turn out to be authentic? What then?"

Lin stops in the sulfurous yellow glow of a streetlight. She looks down at her hands, peppered with powder: at the calluses beneath that powder, shining hard and smooth and silver like pebbles underwater. "Then Amon will have to reconcile the fact that I'm not _just _a bender, Tenzin. I'll fight for my city with everything I have."

The tall man watches her intently. "A fear-mongering campaign," he repeats, tasting her words in his mouth—wincing at their sharpness, their surety. "Are you afraid at all, Lin?"

The dumplings are gone. Lin crumples the wrapper and thinks of what her mother would say: _wait. Wait and listen._

She presses the crinkled ball of her supper's remnants into Tenzin's hand, tells him, "Not yet," and slips past him into the dark.


	5. Crumble

**CRUMBLE**

* * *

It is hot and the air is dancing for it, glitter-glitter-shine like water in the distance, and your lips are dry and you lick them and you are hungry, so hungry it hurts. It hurts deep and twisting, not just in your belly but rippling down your back and into your legs, and when you curl your bare toes you feel the cracks in your heels spread and sometimes you swallow even though nothing's been in your mouth but your tongue for almost as long as you can remember.

You are so hungry.

"Mako," you tell your big brother. "Mako, I'm so hungry."

Mako doesn't look at you. At first you think this is because he doesn't like you to see when he cries, his eyes all full of wet and crackle-gleam yellow, but then you realize he is sleeping, really _sleeping_, his chin on his chest and his hair plastered sweaty and soft to his forehead. Mako hardly ever sleeps anymore and his face, his poor face is purple down one side where his boss hit him trying to turn his head around and you are hungry, yes, so hungry, but more than that you love your brother with every bit of yourself, even the cracks in your heels. So you shut up. Turning onto your side, you curl down until your knees touch your ribs, and with your cheek in the dirt of the alley you look out, out across the dusty, sun-hazed street.

You are so hungry because of something called a famine. That and your parents are gone, they can't take care of you anymore, and Mako won't tell you what happened to them but it was horrible, you know that, because he wouldn't cry so much all the time if it hadn't been. Once you lived in a house with them: with your parents. It was neither big nor small and your mama, she filled it with her singing, and your daddy's big footsteps stomp-stomp-stomped on the stairs in it and sometimes, when you were good, he carried you on his shoulders and you took his hair in your hands and pulled it. You remember that now, and you ache, and it hurts: not just in your belly or your back or your legs, but all over.

They're gone and this other thing, this famine: Mako tells you it means somewhere far away food didn't grow up good and strong. Food—there isn't much of it, there isn't _enough _of it. The carts of the vendors in the streets rattle by empty almost always. The stallkeepers guard their wares like treasure and there are others, others like you and Mako, who have scars and burns and missing fingers from trying to steal small suppers.

You are so hungry, and you look and you see one of those stallkeepers pulling down the tarp of his stand over himself to try to block the sun. At his elbow a pyramid of bright round green things glare proud against the stark beige of everything else. Melons. Have you ever had one? You gulp a dry throatful of nothing and you don't remember.

It hurts and you are so hungry, and Mako with his bruised face gone quiet is sleeping and your parents are gone and there is a famine and not enough food and suddenly, oh. Suddenly you are still hungry, but you are also something else. Stars through the smog, winking: you think you can feel them inside you, tiny burn-sear lights, and you stretch out one hand toward that stallkeeper with his melons. There is no strength in you and your hand falls again just as quickly to the alley floor, smack, but that's okay, that's what's supposed to happen.

The ground _moves _under your fingers.

The melon on the pyramid's top wobbles. The stallkeeper misses it: doesn't catch it as it rolls down its brothers and sisters and falls to the street, where it bounces once, twice before it is still again.

You roll onto your stomach, staring. Then you look over your shoulder at Mako, still sleeping: back to the melon. You dig your elbow into the dirt and you force the flat of your hand down one more time, pow, against the alley floor, and the street sighs and rolls and the melon slides over the sidewalk, bumpity bumpity, until finally it finds its way into the alley and hits you. When you reach to touch it the green is soft and cool somehow. You curl around it and you're crying and you're a big boy, a big _big_ boy, you're not supposed to cry, but Mako cries sometimes so you guess it's okay that you are now.

"Mako," you say. "Mako. Mako!"

With a great quivery twitch he comes awake. His shadow falls over you: his hand paws at your shoulder and he asks, thick, "Bo? What is it, huh?" He sounds hoarse, his voice lost somewhere behind the mush of his ruined face. It makes you cry harder. "Hey, you okay? What—"

He turns you over, flat on your back, and you hold the melon up to him. It's green like your eyes, like your mama's eyes were, and he stares at it and then at you and wow, you both suck at being big boys because you're _both _crying.

Stronger than you, he breaks it open. Inside the flesh is all red and studded with surly dark pips. Maybe you should spit them out, but you are so hungry and you don't, no: you crack them between your jaws. You pull out the melon's warm softness in your hands. Mako does too. When it's gone you eat the shell. You eat and eat until the hurt is gone a little bit, until Mako's hiccupping with laughter and sniffles and tears. His cheek is sticky but he tucks it to yours anyway, and you giggle and you love him, you love him so _much _and there are seeds in his teeth.


	6. Daughter

**A/N: **Spoilers for episode four!

* * *

**DAUGHTER**

* * *

She looks down and sideways at no one, her smile faint, her eyes distant. The strong slant of her shoulders nevertheless sags a little. "I think you're the first authority figure in the city who's happy I'm here," Korra says.

Across the table, Pema frowns.

—-

"You need to show her more affection." The words come like a quiver in the room's coolness. Her hands find his hips: her mouth the nape of his neck. She's on her toes, arching into him—the floorboards creak and he sighs, tipping his head forward. Delicately her fingers work into the ribbon of his sash.

"Hmm?" he asks after a moment. "I'm sorry—what was that?"

She laughs into the fold of his spine, hard and grooved where the muscles weave tight against the tapestry of bone too. "You need"—she presses hot, sweet kisses down the small scoop of skin—"to show her more _affection_, Tenzin. Praise her a bit. Let her know"—her teeth are gentle, quick; the sash comes away and she winds it about her palm, then drops it down to pool between their feet—"she matters to you."

She peels open his robes next. Squinting down into the dark to watch her hands descend, Tenzin attempts, "Who? Korra? She's my student, Pema, not my child—"

The heel of one of those hands smacks sharp over his belly. "But she is_ a_ child. Yours, not yours: does that matter?" Yet her thumb presses: she kneads, softening the sting of the strike into something else, something that makes him shiver. "She should know she's wanted and appreciated. And you _should _appreciate her." She leans her cheek into him, her hair tickling, her temple warm. "She's giving you a priceless, precious opportunity. Don't waste it."

Tenzin closes his eyes. "If you're implying…" He trails off, casts about in search of a suitable reply, and finally settles on, "She's not my father."

"No. Not your child—not your father. Korra is Korra." Reaching to pull the robes down his arms, Pema says, "She's also the vessel of his spirit, and for that one of the only people in this world who possesses the potential to love you as much as Aang did. Don't," she insists again, "waste that."

Considering, Tenzin feathers his fingers over Pema's. She butts her brow into him wordlessly then, and he steps out of his shoes and nods. "Mm. You're right."

"Yes. Yes, I am. Always."

"Show her she's wanted and appreciated," he echoes. "Ah. Yes. …right now?"

Pema's grasp dips. Closes over him. "Well, it _is _late, isn't it? Maybe you should want and appreciate me first."

He follows her suggestion. She is, after all, always right.

—-

The next day he finds his pupil on the dais, circling. Her steps are stilted, her stance too solid and stiff in the knees. He opens his mouth to correct her: stops, thoughtful. He has not forgotten his wife's advice.

_Show her more affection. _

"Korra," he asks the girl gingerly, "are you… doing all right?"

She looks at him and away again, off across the bay toward the city and its spires. A shrug and a set of splayed hands serve as half her reply. "Yeah. I'm fine."

But she isn't. The tight catch of her breath, the tension at her jaw's crease—together they tell Tenzin so. Besides that, he knows fear when he sees it.

_Praise her a bit_.

"I'm glad you turned down Tarlok," he informs her. Still her eyes flicker from him, and he feels in himself a quiet and unexpected anxiety to go with the frustration he has known since the moment he took her into his custody. Naught but a handspan separates her knee and his hip: he could tip an arm sideways and touch her.

The distance between them seems nonetheless insurmountable.

Their ensuing conversation is feeble. He can bend air better than anyone and apparently converse with it admirably too. At last he rises to retreat, his elbows tucked taut to his sides, his hands clenched where she can't see them. When he turns and finds her head drooping low, concern and Pema's counsel clamor within him.

_Let her know she matters to you._

"I'm always here for you if you want to talk," he reminds her.

He leaves her sitting in the silence of her pride, gaze downcast.

—-

She goes to the island against his wishes. As the bay's fog and the haze of distance swallow her whole, he paces the dock: glares openly at Tarlok and tries to ignore the gnawing heaviness in his breast. _Not my child_, he'd said. _Not my child. Not my child._

"Sure, she isn't an airbender yet," says his fellow councilman some time later as the clocktower chimes the day's surrender, "but she's quite capable otherwise. And she _is _the Avatar—"

"She is a _child_," snaps Tenzin. Sick guilt and horror bubble in his gut. He stares across the water, pewter sickles of the moon slow on the current, and thinks of what his wife would say, what his mother would say: thinks of his own daughters out there alone in the dark, capable or not.

He palms his glider and calls the wind to him.

—-

In the mocking glow of a lantern left behind she sprawls, limp and still on the stone of his father's legacy. _Not my child_, he'd said.

_Yours, not yours: does that matter?_

Too late, maybe, he realizes it doesn't.

He runs for her, faster than he ever has in his life, and counts it as penance when his name is not the one she whispers in asking for help at last.

—-

He takes her back to the temple. Ushers her to bed. She is gray-faced and hunched all the while—she shivers herself to sleep, even. He sits on the edge of her bed a long time after, his hand furled at her shoulder, his mind awhirl.

_She should know she's wanted and appreciated._

At dawn he shakes her awake again.

—-

"Why are we up here?" she asks. Below them the temple's campus sprawls, the lemurs sleeping and the bison with them. It is cold, and the panes in the sky's eastern window glare a slippery, smoldery orange beneath the night's retreating velvet.

"This is the temple's highest point." Tenzin gestures to the open balcony, the sharp drop-off below. "Here we find the best headwinds—the steps to the thermals, high above." A second time he motions, cupping his hand to the clouds.

She blinks at him, not understanding. When he snaps open his glider, though, her eyes widen and she breathes, "No way."

"Yes."

"I'm too heavy!" She takes an eager step toward him anyway, gaze burning blue, so blue, fingers twitching and mouth wanting a smile.

"This glider held my father." _And me too. Both of us, so many times_. "It will hold you."

She hesitates, nibbling her cheek: glances at him under her lashes, grinning now. He steps onto the glider's pegs: opens an arm and says, "Trust me."

She does, immediately—rushes to him and belts her arms about him sidelong, thrusting her face up into his shoulder. Her grip is so sure, so _familiar_ Tenzin struggles to swallow.

_Korra is Korra. One of the only people in this world who possesses the potential to love you as much as Aang did._

They lean into one another. Along the horizon the sunrise blazes.

"Ready?" he asks.

On the bar above their heads her hand finds his, clutching there. "Aw man, _so _ready."

They sweep from the balcony to the shriek of her laughter.


	7. Lineage

**A/N: **Happy Mother's Day.

* * *

**LINEAGE**

* * *

"I could help you in Republic City! With the uprising! I could—"

"You could," says her mother, but leaves her on the ice anyway.

—-

"So give these a try," says Bumi, snapping the belt with its pulleys and coils about her waist. "They're stronger this time."

Experimentally she rubs her thumb over the belt's buckle, the stern line of its seam where it bites into her belly and rises up over the narrow ridges of her hips. She looks at Bumi again next, frowning. "You're sure?"

"Sure I'm sure!"

"You've said that before."

"Well"—he grins unabashedly, his teeth white as the snow around them—"I'm _really _sure now, okay? Teo helped me with the components. Spirits," he adds at the ascension of her dubious eyebrow, "have a little faith, Lin."

Lin fingers the belt a second time. "Faith is only good for starting wars."

"And ending them, don't forget!" With complete cheer he sweeps his arms out, firing his thumbs high in a salute to a victory he hasn't yet won. His voice takes on a wheedling tone. "_C'moooon_, give it a go. Please?"

Scratching her nails over the largest coil—there are three, one flush to the small of her back and the other two perched atop her kidneys—Lin considers. Under her touch the thick, braided wire reverberates: but it doesn't sing. She frowns. "This isn't iron."

"No." From the corner of her eye she sees Bumi shake his head, the corkscrew scraggles of his hair bouncing up, down, diagonal. He never oils it like he should. "Steel. It's stronger than iron—won't crack. It's more flexible too." In the furl of his mouth, then, there is something: mischief, raw and shameless and too hot for this infernally cold place. She shivers anyway, gooseflesh walking up her arms under her sleeves. "But maybe you can't bend it. I dunno. It's pretty refined."

And he has her, just like that. Now she can't _not _try his invention because she never backs away from any challenge, nope: years of training with her mother have made her incapable of the mere thought. She grabs the end of one of the wires and jerks it from its coil. It unwinds easily for her efforts, coming away from the pulley with no hitches, bumps, or snags. She is impressed. She does not say so.

She tries to make it curl in her hand, though, and it won't. It stretches across her palm like a dead silver snake.

"Huh," Bumi says at length, watching her. He sounds surprised. Not in the good way, either: this is a cake without candles or frosting. "I guess you really can't."

"Shut up." Feeling like a horrible failure, she straightens and stomps a foot. "Get this wreckage off me, boarcupine butt. Pronto." For the first time in her life she is glad for the Pole's persistent cover of snow, its layers of ice, and Toph Beifong's aversion to the whole place in general. At least her mother isn't here to see her now.

"It's not wreckage," says Bumi unhappily, but he unhooks the belt. Cradling it like he might a sick pet, he turns and carries it back to the village.

Lin stands for a while on the tundra alone, opening and closing her hands.

—-

"Tenzin." She shakes him. "Tenzin, geez, wake _up_."

Her friend blinks open his eyes, like pleasant stones in the light from his lamp, and stares at her. There is a fine thread of saliva spooling down his chin. His lips are dry otherwise. He rasps them together, licks them, and asks, "Nnguh? Lin? What—"

"Ssh!" She claps a hand over his mouth and drags him partway off his bedroll. His temple knocks into her chest: he flinches, the gangly scoop of his shoulders suddenly stiff under her. "Be _quiet_," she tells him, and tacks on, "I need you."

He goes painfully still. "_What_?" The word cracks in his throat.

"I said _quiet_." Tightening her fingers in his shirt, she gives him another shake for good measure. "I need you and your fancy feet to sneak into your brother's hut and steal something for me."

"…oh." For some reason he looks disappointed. "Oh, okay." His face contorts; the bright arrow bolting down between his brows wrinkles at the tip. Bracing himself on his elbows, he tries to sit up. "Wait, huh?"

She tells him what it is she wants. Then: "Meet me outside the village wall in ten minutes." Glancing down, she grimaces. "Wow. Ugh."

The color now of soggy tomatoes, he hunkers back into his sheets—like his father, he refuses furs—and sets about fussing with them prissily. "What?" he clucks. "Don't like what you see? That'll teach you to _knock_, won't it—"

"Good grief, Tenzin, just shut _up _and put some pants on."

—-

"Is this it?"

He holds it up in the moonlight, all spangles and silver. She nods and stands looking at him expectantly, and after a short pause he rolls his eyes and slips forward to fasten it around her, attending her without more protest than a grumble. It is cold, but then again it's always cold here. Out in the distance the ocean is a great black smear with stars stuck in it, and Lin straightens, cracking her knuckles.

"Steel," she says.

Tenzin takes a step back, but that's all. His eyes flick between the belt and her face, the belt and her face. As she pulls the wire from the largest coil, he asks, "Can you bend it?"

She wants to say yes, but she also doesn't want to lie. So she settles for, "If I try hard enough, maybe," and closes her eyes. Rolling the wire in her fingers, she considers the weight of it, the chill of it on her flesh and the rasp of its smoothness over her rougher skin. It is lighter than iron—but stronger, Bumi said.

"Stronger." She whispers this, mostly to herself but maybe a little to Tenzin too. He's a lily: he needs all the encouragement he can get. "Be stronger."

In her hand the wire twitches.

Smiling, Lin clutches it and looks at Tenzin, hovering on his moccasin tiptoes in the frost. "Okay. Come at me. Give it all you've got."

—-

They practice together every night for half a week. After that Lin finds it in herself to apologize to Bumi. "Fine. It's not wreckage," she admits. Shoving it into his hands, she huffs, "But it slides around a lot and the coils dig into my hips." She has bruises to prove it.

He swizzles his jerky to his mouth's edge, blinking: but then he smirks, a slow, spreading sort of expression, and nods. "Okay. So we'll fix it." Sidelong his hand snatches out, groping for a bit of paper, a pen. "Maybe if we, what? Had them going up your stomach? Your back?"

They lean together over the paper. "My back." Lin gestures. "And higher up—like between my shoulders? Here"—she takes the pen from him—"I think this way…"

—-

The ferry with its thick plume of smoke wallows into the harbor a fortnight later. When it puts its plank down at the docks, Lin doesn't bother waiting: she rushes up through the milling throng of people to the ship's broad deck, biting her lips against the wind's brisk chill.

She has scarcely passed the railing when they encircle her: two arms like swathes of brick, squeezing tight. Toph Beifong laughs and swings her about the way she did when Lin was four years old, shoving her face into the younger earthbender's collar. The snub of her nose is frigid, her cheeks red, and Lin hugs her mother's head to her scant breast until the woman snorts and drops her. _Tunk _lament her boots on the deck.

They embrace again at once, traditionally this time. Perfection is the way Lin's head fits under Toph's chin. The scent in the scoop of the strong collar is the same as it always is: dirt, dry and hot and hard. Lin breathes it in and thinks _home_, _I'm home_.

"I'm glad to see you, Mom," she says.

Toph's laugh returns, a rumble in her chest—hoarse on her tongue, almost thin. When Lin checks, her smile is weary. "I'm glad to see you too, kiddo. Well—you know." And Lin does. She tightens her grip until Toph wonders, running her hand's heel high, "Hey now. What's this?" Her thumb taps over the twin pulleys nestled between Lin's shoulders.

"I made it." That's Bumi. He and his father are sharing a similar moment nearby. "But only _Lin _can work it. Go on," he tells the girl. "Show them."

He really means _show her_. The crew of the ferry are watching: Avatar Aang, his head cocked. Sure. Lin's mother's feet curl down against the deck, though, and that's the most important thing.

Lin sucks in a breath. She shifts her arms: flips her hands forward, flexes her fingers. She thinks _stronger, stronger _and _home, I'm home _and the wires, sinuous, flood from their pulleys to Toph's shoulders, where they hook. Pull. Plead.

_I could help you. In Republic City—with the uprising. I could. I really, really could._

Toph follows the tug. Her smile is like nothing Lin has ever seen before, small and stern and quivery-soft—but she brushes it to her daughter's temple and agrees, "I get it. Okay, okay. Pack up."


	8. Assurance

**A/N: **Set after the events of episode three, **The Revelation**. 500 words written in five minutes.

* * *

**ASSURANCE**

* * *

"Oh!" The woman pauses in the doorway, one hand braced on the bulge of her belly, the other thrown up in a star over her lips. "Oh"—her voice softens; her mouth does too, its smile easy—"I'm sorry, Korra. I wasn't expecting to see you up this early."

The Avatar blinks sleepily at Pema from the table sequestered in the kitchen's corner. At her shoulder the window glows gray and pearlescent, thick with dawn's coming. She yawns and admits, "I'm up, yeah, but I dunno whether I'm awake exactly."

"Well, you're officially out of bed before my husband." Shuffling across the small chamber, Pema examines the oven. "I think that alone is quite an accomplishment. Ah"—she clucks her tongue—"the fire's gone out. Mind giving it a—" A minute flame jets into the space between them. It catches the kindling in the oven's base: Pema fans it once, twice, then closes the door and gives Korra a thumbs up. "That's perfect!"

Korra shrugs and straightens: grins. Her hair is rumpled, her pillow's imprint fresh still on the flesh of her cheek. "Anything else I can do?"

"As a matter of fact…"

The next few minutes they work together in companionable quiet. When breakfast is simmering, though, and the table set, Pema looks sidelong at her household's guest. "Why _are _you up so early?" she ventures. "Your training's not for another two hours."

Korra gnaws her lip. "Actually, uhm… I kinda wanted to talk to you."

"Me?" At the girl's nod, Pema laughs and motions to the table. "Huh! I'm no airbending master, but by all means."

But Korra doesn't sit. She hovers anxiously about the oven's edge instead, opening and closing her hands: turns finally to the shorter woman. "I went to an Equalist rally last night."

"Mm. Tenzin told me." Ankles already throbbing, Pema settles at the table alone.

"There were—" Korra pauses, shifting the kettle over the flames. "There were so many _people _there. More than I've ever seen in one place, all non-benders, and they…" Her fingers twitch; the kettle scrapes. "They hated bending," she manages. In her voice there is another statement, hidden if not honest: _they hated me_. "Every single one. They _cheered _when Amon—"

She turns away again. Frowning, Pema makes to rise. "Korra—"

"Pema…" The Avatar's tone tips quiet. "Do… _did_ you ever hate us?"

Thumb flush to the table's seam, Pema blinks. Memories flash quicksilver and sudden across her recollection. The boy who burned her hair in school, laughing, leaving singemarks on her cheek. The trio of girls who turned the ground to slick brown slush beneath her feet on her way to her last exam—papers in the muck, fluttering, filthy.

Her husband. His hands: his breezes, teasing her sleeves. His mother too—the balm of her touch after Pema's firstborn, cool, kind.

Her children. Her _children_.

Pema reaches to tweak Korra's elbow and says briskly, "You know, I don't think I've ever hated anyone."


	9. Lost

**A/N: **300 words written in three minutes. Slight **spoilers **for episode eight!

* * *

**LOST**

* * *

She moved, slow and slipping, tracing her hand over the wall of the pagoda's tower. The stone was wet and her fingers came away so. She drew her hand into a fist: felt the damp trickle in her palm, slick. With a wince she smeared the skin dry on her hip and continued.

He was waiting for her at the top, of course. His shoulders framed the skyline. On the bare crown of his head the moonlight gleamed—she smiled briefly, seeing it, but when he turned he found her face smooth again. Her footsteps clacked soft against the last rise in the staircase.

"She's gone," she said.

It was cold. The wind pulled at her elbows, her hair; her eyes watered and some small part of her, a childhood remnant, cried out in protest at the height. So far below the island's campus was a series of dark blotches. She looked out at it, at them, and wished she hadn't. Her stomach pitched.

"Gone," Tenzin echoed. He looked at her and yet didn't—his eyes went through her to some other place. Lines dug trenches around his mouth. For the first time he seemed old and Lin stepped from the staircase and went to him, her wrists tucked tight at her hips. They stood together as they always had. "Gone where?" he asked. His hands rose, spread: fell, the lean white lengths of them sharp for the night's glow. His chest hitched. "_Where_?" He knew the answer already and his voice nevertheless caught in his throat, thick, hoarse. Disbelieving.

"Councilman Tarrlok's office was in ruins," Lin answered. "There were signs of violent waterbending amidst the wreckage." And firebending, and earthbending—but she had no need to say it. Tenzin heard.

In the eaves of the temple the wind screamed.


	10. Foreshadow

**A/N: **Five minutes, five hundred words.

* * *

**FORESHADOW**

* * *

It's late. She should be sleeping. But she isn't because she can't, and she steals on silent feet down the hall toward the nearest door, her shadow stark on the shoji screens adjacent. The ocean will help, she thinks: the wind on the cliffs. The moonlight tucked like messages in the scrolls of the waves. She'll slip past the Lotus guards and—

There is someone sitting on the steps just outside the door. Korra runs said door smack into the back of the other person's head. She hears them hiss: they turn, spinning around, and Korra ever so gracefully manages to also knee them in the face and step on what feels like their very frail hand all at the same time. Story of her life: she's really good at doing things in threes.

Asami's voice comes out of the dark, anguished. "Geez, Korra, do you _always _wear boots?"

She snatches her hand back, presumably to nurse it. Korra can't see her well enough to tell. In the thick black curtain of the temple's looming shade she can discern only the outline of Asami's hair, long loose curls limned frail silver. Waves. Moonlight. She blinks—heat crawls up her cheeks and she kneels too, groping out with clumsy fingers.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—are you okay? Are you bleeding?" She wills a flame to her palm and holds it up near the thin arch of Asami's cheekbone. Orange splashes the gloom. It flickers in triangles up pale skin—the other girl hisses again, her eyes squeezed shut for the brightness.

"Fine. I'm fine. Ow—careful, that's hot." But she doesn't flinch. With her other hand Korra cups Asami's chin, presses her thumb to its tip. She turns it one way and next the other, and in her flame's glow Asami's lips fold into a tight line over her teeth. She's not bleeding but she'll bruise, probably, and her jaw flexes in Korra's hand as she rolls her tongue in her mouth. "Well," she says. "Do you?"

"Huh?"

"Always wear boots? C'mon. Inquiring minds—they wanna know. _Ow_," she adds, this time for emphasis. Her chin jabs. Korra lets her go, rocking back on her heels at the base of the steps.

"Sorry. I didn't know you were out here."

Easily Asami shrugs. "No, it's okay." And that's all. Her silence is pointed, her gaze on Korra. The Avatar turns her face away, hotter now than the spark in her hand.

"The boot thing? Almost always," she answers, belated. And then, "Yeah. Even to bed."

Asami doesn't ask why. She does smile, though, small—looks out across the deserted lawn toward the cliffs, the bay, the varicolored fingerprint smudge of the distant city. She cradles her hand between her knees, bending the fingers slowly back and forth. They'll bruise too, Korra realizes, and makes to reach for them when Asami says, "Just be careful where you step next time."

She rises and disappears back into the temple, pulling the door closed at her shoulder.


End file.
